Islamabad: Sri Lanka's top Envoy in Pakistan has led an Army against one of the most dangerous guerrilla groups in the world, but the most frightening experience of his life was a grenade attack on a church in the Pakistani capital, he said.

General Srilal Weerasooriya escaped with injuries when a suicide bomber stormed the Protestant international church during a Sunday service in March. Five people were killed. The general believes his military training saved his life.

"I heard something like a firecracker. A man burst in carrying grenades, then I shouted 'get down, get down'. It all happened within 20 seconds. I heard three explosions. When I got up, there was blood and flesh all over. There was human flesh sticking to the ceiling and the walls. I have seen this kind of thing before, but I never expected it at a church," Weerasooriya said.

He was also covered in blood, but it was not his. The daughter of a US Embassy official died in his wife's arms.

Despite their severe trauma, the family- Weerasooriya and his wife, his 85-year-old mother, two daughters and an elderly family friend, was back at the church the following Sunday.

"It was important for the healing process to visit the church," he said, but he added, "It is then that I realised that the man who was right in front of me was killed."

His younger daughter, Rukshani, 18, was inspired to write a eulogy that is now read in churches around the world.

She wrote, "Death never seemed to confront me with a face so ugly, like it did that Sunday... Every time I look back I feel more loved. I feel forgiven all over again. I feel like I was given another chance."

Nearly four months later, with Weerasooriya's wife still picking splinters of glass out of her feet, there has been no breakthrough finding the group behind the attack that breached high security in Islamabad's protected diplomatic enclave.

US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) detectives have interviewed the family of the general-turned-diplomat to establish if he was the target of the church outrage.

"I told the FBI that I didn't think that the Tigers would have to go to a church to get me, If they wanted, they had plenty of opportunity to do it elsewhere."

Weerasooriya was posted as Envoy to Islamabad in September 2000 after retiring from the Army, where he led the military campaign against the feared Tamil Tiger rebels.

The Tamil Tigers are designated a "foreign terrorist organisation" by the US and several other countries and they are regarded as one of the most ruthlessly efficient guerrilla outfits.